C-DAC has embarked on this program as an opportunity
for researchers to identify, track, and forecast the outbreak by using AI and
to aid the discovery of the drug.

This hackathon intends to prepare the research
community to make use of HPC-AI and keep ready for the future.

Hackathon is open to researchers,
intellectuals, MSMEs, startups and industries who are engaged in bringing
out innovative ideas for prediction, forecasting and building health models
that could change the perception of pandemic outbreaks using AI on
supercomputers.

National
Supercomputing Mission

To meet the computational demands of
researchers, intellectuals, MSMEs, startups and industries the National Supercomputing
Mission (NSM) was started.

Through the mission,a vast supercomputing grid,
which consists of more than 70 high-performance computing facilities, are being
installed across the country.

The main objective of this mission is to make
India one of the world leaders in supercomputing and to enhance the capability
of solving problems of national and global purposes.

The Department of Science and Technology
(DST) and the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeiTy)
along with C-DAC Pune and IISC Bangalore are collaboratingfor the mission.

The overall estimated cost of the Mission is Rs.4500 croreto be spent over a
period of seven years beginning from 2020.

India’s first supercomputer was Param Shivay which was assembled at IIT
(BHU). Similarly, Param Shakthi and Param Brahma were assembled at IIT
Kharagpur and IIS Pune.

Today, India ranks 22nd with two
supercomputers in the top 100 global list – Pratyush from Indian
Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) which ranks 57th and Mihir
from National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, which ranks 100th.

The top three supercomputers of the world are –
Summit from the USA, Sierra from the USA, and Sunway TiahuLight from China.

Application
Areas:

Weather
Prediction

Climate Modelling

Computation
of biochemical

Disaster
simulations and managements

Atomic
Energy Simulations

Computation
of material science and nanomaterials, etc.

Today, NSM has gathered momentum to create computer
infrastructure for the country and also to develop the next generation of
supercomputer experts.